Sunday, January 31, 2010

More on Tolstoy's Last Days

The other day I mentioned the peculiar end to Tolstoy's life. Today I learned that there is a book on the subject, The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year by Jay Parini, in which Tolstoy's end seems even more bizarre than I knew. Moreover, that they're making a movie about it, but I recommend just reading the book and not seeing the movie. Movies are hardly ever as good as the book (the only example I can think of is The World According to Garp), and more importantly, the movie overwrites all the hard-earned images that you have in your head from reading the book and you can never get them back.